Introduction:

SAP has cemented its leadership on top of the enterprise software market for quite some time. From the early days of driving faster business processes with powerful software to today’s intelligent business insights and forecasting with machine learning, SAP has created unprecedented value across industries in nearly all sectors. 

With its overarching presence in business management, SAP proved to be a significant contributor in the digital economy by uplifting businesses running their software through new innovative solutions. One of the most widely recognized modern-day innovations from SAP that pivoted it from a legacy software company to a digital leader was the introduction of SAP HANA – the in-memory relational database management system.  

SAP HANA became the key focus around which SAP built new capabilities for the digital era enterprise and today powers nearly every offering from the German giant from their ERP, CRM, and advanced business analytic solutions. 

Now comes the key question – why did HANA become so popular with enterprises? Let us examine how enterprises of today can enhance their ROI by migrating to HANA

Lightning-Fast Business Operational Agility

HANA is a really fast database management system that enables information retrieval in real-time. Every digital application an enterprise relies on needs data as their fuel to drive more value. With HANA at the core, this data is stored, organized, and made available with lightning speed to empower businesses with faster decision-making prowess. In a rapidly changing consumer market where trends change in a matter of weeks or months as opposed to years in the past, enterprise systems must be ready to respond at breakneck speeds. HANA creates a backdrop for more dynamic and responsive enterprise digital operations.

More than a Database

While faster information access and processing is one side of the story, better management and interpretation of data will be the key differentiator for an organization from its competitors. HANA offers a wider scope of data management than a traditional database (which simply stores and retrieves data on-demand). In addition to speed, HANA offers a complete data management experience by bringing on-board predictive analytics, intelligent data warehousing, spatial data processing, text and streaming data analytics, and a whole bunch of innovative data services. Businesses can leverage any of these capabilities individually or combined to derive better value from their digital platforms.

Autonomous Enterprise Operations

Ever since SAP S/4 HANA was released in 2015, there has been a massive influx of enterprises, big and small, to experience the power of autonomous enterprise operations offered by the platform, which combines ERP, CRM, and SRM into a unified solution built specifically for HANA. By migrating to S/4 HANA, enterprises can enjoy the benefits enjoyed by some of the most successful businesses worldwide across several industries. With S/4 HANA, enterprises can bring on-board the world’s most trusted standards of digital operations, compliance and workflow management, business process streamlining, and intelligent business forecasting. HANA’s agility, speed, and support for rapid development of innovative capabilities and its large collection of on-demand data services like analytics, AI, Machine Learning, etc. make it easier for businesses to automate years of stagnant transactional processes and drive more efficiency in their business operations.

Open to Integration

SAP HANA is not just restricted to the SAP ecosystem of digital applications. SAP moved away from their legacy approach of keeping their products on strict home use to allow for a modern and more open technology architecture. It can easily integrate and operate along with almost every leading business management software like CRM or ERP or SRM or any enterprise system for that matter. HANA allows for a source-agnostic enterprise data management experience wherein; information access and management capabilities of its core offering can be used by any supported 3rd party business system to deliver value that was previously in unchartered territory. 

Better Decision-Making

SAP HANA sets the foundation of an intelligent business wherein decision-makers can build their digital enterprise landscape on top of HANA. This gives them access to real-time insights, faster and immensely scalable transactional efficiency for large volumes of data, and a single unified channel to converge all their diverse data signals. The in-memory architecture and the radically new development philosophy encouraged by HANA for application development provides unmatched reporting capability for enterprise systems connected to HANA. This allows leaders to draw conclusions faster and make decisions on key growth areas seamlessly. 

SAP HANA is undoubtedly one of the finest offerings from SAP for enterprises having high digital ambitions. From allowing faster processing to helping build an intelligent business management framework for end-to-end operations, HANA offers a huge degree of flexibility for enterprises to innovate at scale. Migrating to HANA can help enterprises experience a seamless digital journey with better ROI thanks to the continuously evolving capabilities that HANA supports for industries worldwide.